Introduction

With Intel not doing a lot with the CPU and motherboard market till the middle of the year when Computex hits, we're seeing companies hit us up with some refreshes of popular established chipsets. Recently we have not only received a bunch of Z77 motherboards, but we've also seen a couple of X79 ones show up to continue to keep Intel and its partners in the spotlight.

Outside of these Intel boards recently, though, we've got a couple of AMD boards lined up waiting for the recently looked at AMD A10-5800K and FX-8350 processors to be installed in to. Today, though, isn't about AMD based chips or boards, instead we're all Intel here. The X79 Express chipset really should need no introductions, it's been the chipset of choice in our video card testbed since launch thanks to the power house of CPU's that fit in it including the beloved Extreme Edition series. We're not exactly dealing with the Intel X79 chipset today, though. Instead we've got the Intel C606 chipset on offer which is actually the server version of the high-end X79 chipset. It brings with it a few extra options which we'll cover as we work our way through the motherboard.

Along with support for some of the fastest CPU's on the planet, the chipset also carries support for massive amounts of RAM and video cards. While it's been almost a year since we looked at an X79 motherboard, we dust off our trusty 3960X that has been sitting around and find out just what this chipset has to offer.

Today we're looking at a board from GIGABYTE with the X79S-UP5-WiFi name attached to it. The UD5 / UP5 name has always been one that has impressed us with a strong feature set and a more aggressive price point than its bigger brothers.

There are a few things we need to do before we get into the performance side of things. We'll check out the box and the package to see what GIGABYTE is doing in this area. Once we've done that we'll move onto a closer look at the board before heading into the BIOS. Finally before we get into the testing side we'll check out our testbed here today and look at how we went with the overclocking side of things.

Package

While we're dealing with quite a large box, we're haven't got one that opens up like we see on some of the high-end GIGABYTE offerings. With that said you can see we've got an absolute wealth of information here. Across the top we've got a large push on the Ultra Durable 5 feature while across the bottom you can see the 3D Power and 3D BIOS is being pushed.

Looking at the back of the box you can see a lot more detail when it comes to the main features that are being pushed on the front of the box. Across the top you can see an expansion of the Ultra Durable 5 side of things and how it offers more power efficiency and better cooling throughout the motherboard. Covered below that is the 2x Copper PCB, Dual UEFI BIOS and look at some of the main features of the motherboard via a picture.

Across the bottom we've got the 3D Power 3-Way Digital Engine, mention of the included Wi-Fi + Bluetooth 4.0 card that's included along with a look at the 3D BIOS that GIGABYTE has been using for a while.

Moving inside the package we've got a lot of the usual suspects here. We've got a bunch of paperwork and a couple of CD's including the standard driver one along with another one for the WiFi / Bluetooth card. We've also got six SATA cables included along with a 3-way SLI connector, standard 2-way SLI connector and a CrossFire bridge.

One of the bigger standouts for the bundle is the combo WiFi / Bluetooth card along with its two antennas. It supports Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n on the wireless front. When it comes to Bluetooth we've got support for 4.0, 3.0+HS, 2.1+EDR making for quite a versatile card.